Analysis from a survey, carried out by the European Universities Association (EUA), comes as consortia of institutes revolt over price increases and promote open access across the continent.

A new relationship is established between EBSCO Information Services (EBSCO) and Infoestratégica Latina, one of the biggest general library service vendors in Latin America. This agreement will ensure that Latin American libraries adopting the FOLIO Library Services Platform (LSP) will be able to rely on hosting and services support.

CAICYT’s institutional project on biblioclastia created a broad definition of the phenomenon of knowledge destruction. Biblioclastia is understood not only as the destruction of books and other media to knowledge, but also as the deprivation of rights of institutions and agents responsible for insuring their preservation and circulation. The proposed definition is explained, and both a methodology and a controlled vocabulary are presented.

The authors, Mela Bosch and Tatiana Carsen, manage the CAICYT- CONICET (Centre for Scientific and Technological Information) in Argentina.

ABES,  French Higher Education Bibliographic Agency, is currently implementing its Shared Library Management System –aka SGBm–.  In the April issue of Arabesques Journal, professionals elaborate on the evolution of library management systems, the changes in bibliographic data models and the digital transition.

Libraries and related organizations coalesce where there are scale advantages: to lobby, to negotiate and license, to reduce costs, or to build shared infrastructure. The sharing of knowledge and innovation that comes from working together is an important reason why these library consortia flourish. Libraries recognize that collective action delivers scale benefits. In this series of 4 blog posts, collaboration for scale is examined in four areas: influence, learning, innovation and capacity.

The National Bibliographic Knowledgebase (NBK) is a transformative new national service that will aggregate bibliographic data at scale and link with other data sources.  The universal benefit for libraries to join in with the NBK is to make UK library data much more discoverable wherever users are trying to find print and digital scholarly resources. It will also greatly enhance their ability to manage and develop their collections.  The live NBK beta interface is openly available at: https://nbkbeta.copac.jisc.ac.uk

After a two year development period (alpha and beta phases), JISC is aiming to launch the ‘live’ service in January 2019.

As library discovery and delivery has largely moved online, the scholarly workflow of academic researchers has become increasingly fragmented. Faculty members are using a variety of software solutions to find, retrieve, organize, annotate, cite, and share information, including library resources. The current status of discovery of library resources within citation management software is outlined, along with expected future developments. Utilizing findings from two Mellon funded studies, it explores the challenges users face in managing their individual scholarly workflows, and recommends optimizations designed to mitigate information loss and increase researcher productivity.

The full collection of papers from the 2017 ARL Satellite meeting: Digital Humanities – Opportunities and Risks Connnecting Libraries and Research are now available online from HAL, the French National Repository.

Academic libraries are increasingly launching their own publishing programmes. Libraries have a long history of stewarding scholarly literature. Increasingly, they are applying their knowledge of the scholarly communications process to launch their own publishing programs. The goal is to disseminate unique and original content, and showcase their campus’ contributions to knowledge. As the Library Publishing Coalition attests, it has found a valuable and expanding niche. Pushing the boundaries of what is considered publishing may in fact be one of library publishing’s greatest strengths, writes Sarah Lippincott, a scholarly communication and digital scholarship consultant.

Researchers at Stockholm University can now get published in Open Access journals without paying article processing charges (APC), owing to new agreements with four international Open Access publishers. The aim is to increase the number of Open Access publications, reduce the researchers’ administration and be more cost-effecient.